Since they were new sites I had 0 members to start off with. This is a problem with all sites just starting off. I solved my problem by making it so guests could not see or browse members until they signed up. Since the site was free to join the sign up was my conversion. I sent tons of targeted traffic to the site and had great success with sign ups. The very first users were quite confused but I posted messages everywhere thanking them for joining and assuring everyone that more members will be joining. I stepped up my traffic and was getting 100-150 sign ups a day.

I had gotten to 1.7k members and disaster struck. Through my own error and my lack of php/sql experience I had the script delete the entire database instead of a single user. I had lost about 1k in traffic but I hoped that members would sign back up when they saw their accounts were gone. I posted many messages about the error and moved on. About 600 members signed back up the following week. Which made me step up my advertising once again.

After more advertising and another 600 invested my site is now at 1895 members and grows by 10-15 a day from SEO. Users do not seem to be staying on the site for long though because adsense reports $2.81 in the last 7 days! The only time adsense reported some real numbers is when I was heavily advertising. I would be earning about half my ads in adsense so a 100 spend would make 50. I would keep this going until it was profitable but I currently do not have the capital to grow the site to a point of sustained profitability.

I have learned that the key to dating sites is impressions. The key to impressions is users. The key to users is marketing.  Once you have all of these things down you should have a profitable site. Right now I am hoping that I will be able get the user base high enough that another dating site will want to buy me out but that is going to take a long time. Until then I will be trying to make the site more profitable.

Also before everyone starts posting about using affiliate links instead of adsense, I want everyone to know that the sites are extremely niche in nature. I only found one affiliate program which I tried and it reported 0 leads and 0 signups after a month of traffic. Which would have been $200 in adsense revenue. If anyone thinks they can help or has experience in building dating sites hit me up at beer at beermonies.com and we can chat on skype or something.

If any of you missed out on whats going on so far here is the short and simple. I bought Link Farm Evolution and challenged my self to pay off the cost of the program within the 30 day trial. I started a new site and went to town. The site ended up making $750 or so before CJ shut me down for having a brand name in the domain. They then reversed all the sales I had for the program and banned me from using it again. I ended up having to go though 3 domain names and finally got back in the program with their in house program.

I then posted how my 30 day challenge failed since I ended up losing all the money I had made. Since I had gone though 3 domains and 301′s and a big mess I could not say how well my linking plan had worked. I still can’t comment on the links as a whole since I don’t even have the blog names I made a few months back. What I do have is a brand new domain that’s got two other domains 301′ed to it and a big mess of links.

So here is where I stand today. First page for my targeted keyword (8), generic domain with no keyword in it, and a page rank of 2. Truthfully I am pretty shocked. The linking for this project turned into a big rats nest of dead links, 301′s, and web2.0 pages.

My plan was to build several 2.0 pages (articles, squdoo, hubpages, etc) and then build LFE blogs that linked to them. They in turn would link to my site laundering the links a little so it was not so oblivious. I managed to get the squidoo and hubpage up and I had LFE make me 500 blogs (380 worked). I then had these 380 blogs post about my topics and had one of the 2.0 pages in its blogroll. I also had a few of the blogs just have my main site in the blogroll so they had one of three possible links. I also had LFE pligg each of the blogs I made, I think it was 20 times per blog post.

This is when I ran into my problems with CJ and ended up kinda scrapping the project because it took more than the 30 days to get the new domains up and to get accepted into the private offer. I didn’t see any use to continue with the site if I was going to get denied for the affiliate program. Things halted and I moved on.

It wasn’t until you guys started to ask me about my recap that I took the time to see if “time” had played a major factor or not. Like all SEO projects it did. The site isn’t ranking in the cash as well as I would like but since I joined the private offer I have made $215 in earnings from my site. This is all SEO traffic because I have long since moved on to other projects. So if you want to turn my 30 day challenge into say a 6 month challenge then its been a great success. With a bit more work I could continue to work on this site and easily increase its income and want to know how I am doing to do it? LFE.

I have actually repurchased LFE since my challenge and I hope that it will help me with this site and a few new sites that I am going to be working on. LFE takes a LOT of work to get running properly. Its got a huge learning curve and its going to take you months to make your own lists to get it working at 100% like it should. But I think its worth it, I own the program and I have several sites ranking that can back up my claims. You can never have to many links or to many tools to help you make them. Check it out at LinkFarmEvolution.com give it 30days and see if you can get better results than I did.

The First Blow:

I believe it was around April 10th, I had just gotten back from a week long trip to Key West to visit family and work a bit on my iPhone app. I got back home rested and full of new ideas, until I checked the mail. Seems the day after I got back I got a lovely letter from the IRS saying I owed over 10k in back taxes. Over 10k…  I went a bit pale and called up my accountant. Normally he mails me the taxes due (quarterly) I go to the bank and pay them, no problem. But it seems that one of his letters got lost in the mail and I never got it. It was this letter that told me I owed the IRS this extra 10k. So the taxes were never paid. Ive got the cash to pay them, it is just quite the blow to see it vanish when you thought it was yours. To add insult to injury  the IRS taxed on a good 1.5k in fees and intrest for being less than a month late, we are working on getting them removed. Taxes due the 26th, gotta remember to sign in a pay them…

The Second Blow:

My iPhone app has grown beyond my design and needs to almost be completely reworked before its released. Not a problem except at the same time I figured this out my program got flaky. I don’t know what his deal is be is business or personal but hes almost fallen off the map. Slow to respond, and slow to get things done. Its been 3 weeks now without a finished version 1, 3 weeks to fix 2 little bugs. Ive finally gotten hold of him and we talked it over, I told him if he is not capable of doing the work I will find a guy who is. Hopefully this will get him in gear, thank god for escrow.

Third Blow:

I had been working on importing some products from China to get into the online retail space. Durring said time I found a product and found that I can drop ship it before I stock it. Awesome. So ive spent 3 weeks building a online store and setting up amazon sales. I find out after I pay amazon the $30 that they have the category locked and I am not allowed to sell stuff in it. No refund allowed they duped me into paying them to not be able to sell anything. On top of this I learn that the drop ship guys are super flaky. They have no need or want for drop shippers, you have to pull teeth just to be told whats in stock and don’t expect to be told if it sold out. Customers have no problem waiting weeks for shipments right? The store has finally launched though and they say everything is now in stock, time to see if this is a waste of time or not.

Lots of bad news so far this month, lots of scares. There is a sense of worry each time I get the mail now. You can’t let stuff like this get you down though. I continue to try my best push though this mess and I hope that next month most of these problems will be resolved. I also have a few more projects I have thought of, maybe their launch will go smoother.

What I can talk about is the process so far. I set myself a budget that I felt was reasonable for the app and went about finding a programmer. I asked around to a few of my buddies but no one had a really good programmer they could recommend. I looked over my options and figured I would just give eLance a shot. I set up my application and set it to invite only. Sure this keeps a lot of people from bidding on my application but it also keeps it out of the serps and the eyes of competitors. You really are an idiot if you are going into detail about an idea on eLance since anyone could just steal it and do it them selves.

After giving as much detail as possible so I could get an accurate quote I sent out invites to all the top iPhone companies. The first week I had 15 no response, 4 declines, and 2 bids. This would have been great but the bids were for 4x-6x my set budget. I was starting to think I was way to low on my budget but the app seemed simple in my mind. Heck over half the programming could be found on Google anyway. I stuck to my guns and invited the next batch of programmers. I got another 17 no response, and 2 more bids. This makes 4 bids out of like 50 programming companies! You would think with this whole recession thing going on that people would want work, but I guess I was wrong.

Thankfully the one guy that bid within my budget is an awesome programmer, a young intelligent guy about my age doing his own thing. We went over more details and he got the point and saw what I was trying to do. We talked a few days more and I awarded him the contract. Now 3 weeks into the application process we are at 60% completion and things are looking great. As I said the first version should be out in about 3 more weeks as I tie up the loose ends and prepare the apps website and promotions. Ill go into more detail at launch, and give out my programmers contact info if he wants me to.

I looked into things when I moved here and saw I had three options. One was to move my corporation from Minnesota to Florida which I found out is a major pain in the ass and requires a attorney to do the paper work and show up for a day in court. Second was to operate as a foreign corporation operating in Florida. This would cost me $300 a yr in fees and I would still have to pay MN state tax, which is retarded. Third was to start over and just make a new corp for $160 and move everything over to it. I finally decided to start a new corp since Florida has no state tax and is a much better place to have a corporation than most states.

I set everything up to go to my dads address in Key West so even if I move again my corp can stay in Florida. I really should have done this from the get go but didn’t. Lesson learned, its time to move forward.  I have picked a new and shorter name than I used last time which will be great as I had a lot of dumb looks when I tried to read off my old super long domain name. I also made sure to pick a name general enough that it could include my new business ventures and not seem weird.

If you are just starting your corporation you really should look at all of your options. You could have corporation in any state you want so long as you have a registered agent in that state. This could cost as little as $20/mo from some places since all they do is forward mail. This $240 could save you thousands of dollars in taxes so it’s well worth it to consider this. During my time in Minnesota I paid over $6k in state taxes that’s a hell of a lot more than $240/yr. Something to think about if your starting out or paying to much in taxes.

This past month I launched a few REAL dating sites. Yeah I know its insane and starting a site costs some serious money to get it going. The thing is that I had a bunch of niche dating domains that I was using as a whitelable with copeac. What’s odd is that my little one page landers were ranking for their terms and saw some normal traffic. This was great until I saw copeac’s leads had dropped to nothing. I am not sure if they killed the program, changed the backend, or if the code needed to be changed on my end. It never did as well as I had hoped it would when I started so rather than get it going again I dropped the program and researched into making these landers into real dating sites.

It took me a week to find a free script / backend that would work out the box. I was not going to pay to have anything made with my test since it would probably crap out anyway. I ended up using PHPizabi for my sites and despite it being a old POS it was simple enough that I could use the php/sql code to fix any problems I found and add new features. I highly recommend not using this script though! It is the biggest POS I have ever seen and lacked even the most basic of features. It took me 3 weeks of coding to get it to a useable state, heck it still needs more work but its good enough to run now until I decided on getting a script made later.

I threw up ads on facebook for m 4 dating sites across my niches and soon learned that some of them were way to much of a niche. Great for landers, but horrible for real sites. So three of them have died off a bit, they still get SEO members but it’s a slow trickle. In a year I should have a pretty good crop of users on them though. What’s left is the one site I didn’t expect much from but did very well on facebook. I was getting a sign up for less than a dollar and I invested $1,000 into the site for member ships. At one point I got to 1,100 members and that’s when I caused a major crash trying to fix some SQL BS with the backend. Through my own fault I deleted every member on the site with one button! Should have seen it coming but was in a hurry. After fixing the error i learned that the SQL backup feature of PHPizabi never worked and was just in the template but no code to execute I about died. I have since fixed the bug I caused and wrote my on backup script but it was a major set back. The members took it with stride though and most signed back up within a week. With SEO traffic and returning members the site is now at 762 active members and is growing.

When advertising I was making 30-40 in adsense and spending 100 in ads. It helped pad the cost at start up. Having now stopped the ads the site is making about 2-3 bucks a day in adsense which isn’t bad for a site this small. I may have 762 members but they are not all active everyday, if the site scales as well as it is in the future it could generate some serious income. If i had 10,000 members the site would do at least $30 a day in adsense alone and could be made more profitable with affiliate ads. Sure its not major money but its pretty good for an automated site which someday could grow to tens of thousands of users.

I have lots of other stuff to talk about but this post is long enough so I will schedule them for the following days.

First off, you need to use the OLD adsense code. I made a new add and pulled the new code and I just could not get this to work. Maybe its just me, but it didn’t work. Back to the old code.

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-0000000000000000″;
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 200;
google_ad_format = “200x200_as”;
google_ad_type = “text”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_text = “444444″;
google_color_url = “444444″;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js“> </script>

The above code will make a 200×200 ad that looks normal. But as you see I have given the correct options on changing the link, bg, and text. These fields accept html color codes and you can put any color you want. If you want ads of a different size just change the sizes and change the ad_format to match your sizes making sure to keep the “as” at the end of it.

This is some seriously simple stuff here but I had to post it since Google totally failed me in finding this basic information in the first place.

As of right now my challenge has been a total failure, but this is not the fault of LFE. I had one specific site that I had just started and it was going to be the target of all of my LFE work. The offer had a high payout and I had already seen a bit of income from it. All I needed to do was rank and thats where LFE was to come in.

The problem I ran into was some serious trademark protection as complained about in Is Your Trademark Protection Out of Control? the site just happened to have been the target of this retarded trademark protection. Even after I attempted to comply to the restrictions they put into place I was still banned from the program for having a 301 redirect from the old site to the new one. I attempted to explain this to them but they didn’t care much and that was it. In two days time 3 weeks of my efforts had been destroyed and a fair bit of money along with it.

It was that day that I lost my new found drive to keep working. I had finally gotten back to some serious work and was getting into the groove of things when it was crushed. Rather than picking my self up from this mess and moving on I fell back into my old rut and started wasting time again. For the last two weeks I have been working on and off very little. I tried a few campaigns and they broke even, I couldn’t get them into profit. I checked stats and made sure accounts had money and other than that I haven’t done much of anything. Two weeks were wasted away with Global Agenda on Steam. To further beak me down during this time I found out that I was getting 0.01 per click on my eBay pages due to CPC.

Finally last night I got some good news my first bit of good news this month. I managed to get back into the program I was banned from via a private network that they ran. I have totally removed any chance of any trademark BS this time but the lack of a keyword domain is certainly going to hurt my chances. Better this than nothing though. At the same time I did this I decided to go back and check some of the other things that kicked my ass this month. My eBay CPC was now at 0.25 since I removed one under performing domain and even more good news when I checked adsense and saw may sites were starting to hit their $1.00 a day goal.

Some light has finally shown up at the end of the tunnel and I am grasping for it. Trying to get my efforts back in order and optimize what I can to help try and keep the ball rolling. I now have more targets for LFE and finally some ideas are coming back. Today is building and optimizing but tomorrow I will certainly be finally putting LFE to use.

The good news is that just the other day when I did my OS reinstall I found SEO Quake for chrome. Its a bit different from what I was using in firefox but its been pretty cool to see the seo stats of all of the sites in the sers when I search for a term. As far as I know this is the only fully working SEO addon for chrome but its doing a great job and is making the move from firefox that much easier.

Don’t have chrome yet? If you are still on the fence you really need to check it out. I use Chromium a open source build of Google Chrome. All of the benefits of Chrome and none of the Google data capture and spying. You can download and compile the source your self from or you can grab the latest compiled trunk release. Try it out and you will see why people are making the switch to Chrome/Chromium.

One of these companies running on CJ has just given me the boot from their program and retracted all of my earnings. This is a loss of about 2k and a few weeks of time. So what happened?

Lets call this company “Widgets” for the sake of this post. My first attempt at promoting this site was with a site called WidgetsCoupons.com a highly searched term. The company freely mails out these coupons to affiliates each month to help with promotions.

A few weeks go by and CJ contacts me about my trademark infringement and demands I fix the problem and gives me the terms again.  Yes I know I was breaking them by having “Widgets” in my domain but it was just for SEO reasons. I never claimed I was the company or had anything to do with them other than trying to promote the use of the coupons.

So I get a new domain, one without the term “Widgets” in it. I write them back saying I was sorry and everything had been fixed. I received an e-mail back thanking me and I move on. A few weeks pass and I have worked on the site even more. Suddenly I am presented with an email once again from CJ stating I am banned from this campaign and all earnings are being retracted from its sales.

They gave no reason this time, just stated that I was banned and could never run it again. I am waiting on a reply from them but having read their terms once again the only thing I can see is meta tags.

That’s right. CJ has listed in their terms that you cannot have the term “Widgets” in any meta tags on your site since that is trademark infringement.  This is where I feel things are getting out of hand. How can you ask people to promote your products and basically say that you cannot put the term “Widgets” anywhere on your site.  I say anywhere since my site was auto generating its meta tags based on the content of the page.

So because my page was about “Widgets” my meta keywords, and meta description both included the term. I was there by breaking the rules according to CJ and removed from the program.

I have two degrees in business and I understand the reasons behind this but many companies are just taking things to the extreme. They are so insecure with their online presence that they are afraid their affiliates will out rank them or some how confuse their customers. But in doing so aren’t they just hurting them selves more though a reduction in sales? If I make a site saying how great “Widgets” are and how everyone needs to buy them and then send that traffic to the “Widgets” home page. Isn’t this in fact helping the business make more sales?

Companies need to realize that affiliates are not the enemy. The whole reason you have an affiliate program is to gain marketing and sales. Affiliates should be seen as partners in your marketing efforts. They should be afforded just as much use of your trademark as you would if you hired a marketing company. By crippling us you are only crippling your selves. Allow us the use of your logo and brand name, we are not all scammers and fraudsters.